Alternatives

Licensing

Faculty and staff

Gustavus Adolphus College provides the Microsoft Office Suite to all of the college-owned computers. Our license also allows for faculty and staff of the College (those who have an office computer) can install a copy of our Office product on their home computers at a deep discount. Please see https://gustavus.edu/gts/Hup for complete details.

Students

The full version of Microsoft Office Pro is available free to all current active students through Gustavus Office 365. To learn more visit Office 365.

Compatibility

Microsoft Office 2007 for PC and 2008 for Mac have known compatibility issues due to a change in file formats. For example, word documents in Office 2003 are all .doc files and documents saved in 2008 are all .docx files. Due to this difference it may be possible that files from the new Office programs will not work in the older Office programs. There are several solutions to this problem:

If you have Office 2007

Change the default format that Microsoft Office uses to save files:

Open the program of your choice (Word, Excel, etc.).

Click the circle in the upper left corner of the main window to open the file menu

Click the options button found in the lower right corner of the file menu next to the exit button.

In the options window choose the Save tab found on the left and under "Save files in this format:" change the format to "97-2003".

If you have Office 2010

Change the default format that Microsoft Office uses to save files:

Open the program of your choice (Word, Excel, etc.).

Click the file tab in the upper left corner of the main window to open the file menu

Click the options button found in the lower part of the file menu right above the exit button.

In the options window choose the Save tab found on the left, and under "Save files in this format:", near the top, change the format to "Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc)".

If you have Office 2008

Change the default format that Microsoft Office uses to save files:

Open the program of your choice (Word, Excel, etc.).

Open preferences by opening the Preferences under the menu labeled the name of your program (e.g. Word, Excel, etc.). Or, open Preferences by using [Apple + ,].

Click the Save button and change the default file type to 97-2004.

If you have an older version of Office

For college owned machines, if you would like to update to the most recent version of Office, please call the Technology Helpline x6111. You can also download a converter to read the new formats created in Office 2007 and 2008:

Office 2004 for Mac

Open the program you wish to get the converter for.

Choose Check for Updates in the Help menu.

The program will download all recent updates. You may need to check for updates more than one time.

After updating the application you need to download and install the Microsoft Open XML File Converter, available from Microsoft.